A CNN truck last month outside Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y., where the first presidential debate was held. CreditSam Hodgson for The New York Times
This is an atypical election. Donald Trump has moved the needle. As Eugene Robinson put it in The Washington Post, “Trump lies the way other people breathe.” For Jacob Weisberg of Slate, this campaign is not the usual apples versus oranges. It’s “apples versus rancid meat.”
Here’s a sampler of what Trump has trumped-up: The so-called “birther” lie that President Obama was not born in the United States; the I-was-against-the-war-in-Iraq lie; the I-never-said-climate-change-was-a-hoax lie; the crime-is-rising lie. Beyond the mendacity, Trump has revealed a persistent strain of hair-trigger nastiness.
Confronted by this, the basic questions for the press have been: If covering Trump is also providing free advertising —more than $2 billion worth — should he be covered less or not at all? If Trump is outside the frame of conventional political discourse, how far outside the frame of conventional coverage does the media have to move? And if his evident personal problems render him unfit for the presidency, is it more important to ensure by any means that he is not elected or to be critical of Hillary Clinton where justified?
In other words, is any equivalence of treatment of the candidates “false” because they are not compatible, any more than, say, harassment and murder are compatible crimes?
First, not covering Trump is not the answer. It is the media’s actual responsibility to provide voters with as accurate and probing a portrait of the two candidates as possible.
Second, the media reacted too slowly to cover Trump. There were fast responses. Since January, The Huffington Post has appended an editors’ note to every story about Trump that begins: “Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar.”
But there was also hesitation. My newspaper, The New York Times, spoke of Trump’s misrepresentations, but it was not until a few weeks ago that we called Trump a liar. Since that breakthrough in a front-page story, the word has appeared regularly in relation in Trump, as if the Gray Lady has experienced a kind of catharsis: Goddammit, I can curse now!
I don’t see what alternative to the word “lie” existed. Trump “is crashing the system,” in the words of Jay Rosen of New York University.
Overall, the press has been aggressive in reporting Trump’s failings. The Times’s terrific scoop on Trump’s $916 milliondeclared tax loss in 1995 and The Washington Post’s string of revelations on how Trump has used the Trump Foundation as a kind of personal piggy-bank are examples.
The question is whether such stories impact Trump supporters or amount to “preaching to the choir” in tribal America. I believe perseverance counts.
The Times has also published critical pieces about Hillary Clinton, a candidate mistrusted by many voters. This has aroused plenty of ire, including from the prominent political scientist Norman Ornstein, who sees an anti-Hillary pattern, or a sexist pattern, or glaring “false equivalence.”
I had a vigorous Twitter exchange with Ornstein over a recent page one Times story that chronicled how Clinton spent much of the summer at fund-raisers with the rich. At one, children were permitted to ask a question if their parents would pony up $2,700. He thought it had no place on page one. I disagreed. The Clintons’ coziness with the hedge fund crowd is an issue in an election where Bernie Sanders made rising inequality matter. A recent front-page look at how Clinton responded to her husband’s infidelities has also prompted anger. I thought it provided a compelling portrait of the resolve and resilience — as the well as the capacity for forgiveness — of the woman who may soon be president.
Cover the hell out of the story without fear or favor: That must still be our byword.
Clinton is a candidate who made the grave misjudgment, as secretary of state, of using a private email server; and then said, untruthfully, that the F.B.I. had declared her to be truthful in her answers. At a moment when Americans want change, the Clintons feel like old news. That is why millennials galvanized by Sanders are not galvanized by her.
These are all essential areas of coverage. Giving Clinton a pass is not the answer to Trump.
Of course, the press makes mistakes. NBC’s Matt Lauer pressed Clinton and went lightly on Trump. We missed the important Bondi story: How the Trump Foundation gave money to Pam Bondi, the Florida attorney general who was contemplating joining an investigation into Trump University and then, lo and behold, did not.
It is tempting, but wrong, to seize on every error as proof of “false equivalence.” It’s proof, rather, that the press is human.
Nor, however, can fairness or balance preclude making it plain through rigorous reporting that while Clinton is imperfect, Trump is awful; that while she has trafficked in the evasiveness that is the stuff of politics, he has lied; and that while America would be in safe hands with Clinton, it would be in clear and present danger with the irascible, insecure, Putin-friendly, NATO-averse Trump. The most powerful office in the world was not made for a phony on a power trip.
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